in message
I can not open my attachments to my emails, I click on the paper clip
and a
warning comes up and says that my outlook is running some where else
and to
restart my computer. This does not help. I have office 2003
"outlook is running some where else" is not an error message issued by
Outlook. Don't paraphrase or describe the error message. Copy
verbatim the error message.
When you thought you exited Outlook, did you check Task Manager's
Processes tab to ensure outlook.exe was not still running. Sometimes
when you exit Outlook, it doesn't exit and only partially unloads but
the remnant left behind in memory is unusable and can cause all sorts
of problems (with Outlook, Word, and even in Windows Explorer). After
exiting Outlook, and if outlook.exe is still shown as loaded in
memory, wait a minute and then kill it. I've seen the same problem
with a remnant winword.exe process for Word after supposedly exiting
Word.
It has been a long-standing defect across all versions of Outlook that
it might not fully unload. Some claim that add-ons cause the problem.
When Outlook loads, it also has to load all add-ons. When Outlook
exits, it has to first unload all the plug-ins. All threads within
any Outlook process for a COM plug-in will run in-process with
Outlook. If they screw up, they'll screw up Outlook. If a plug-in
crashes or becomes unresponsive, Outlook will fail to load or unload.
However, I've seen outlook.exe hang around after exiting Outlook for a
fresh install of Windows and a fresh install of MS Office. Sometimes
the remnant outlook.exe causes problems. Sometimes it doesn't so you
don't know there is a remnant process until you check (and I've seen
up to 5 remnant instances of outlook.exe loaded at the same time even
when the /recycle command-line parameter was used). Because of this
stupidity in allowing plug-ins to enforce dependency on the
outlook.exe process, and because of these problematic hangs on
outlook.exe when trying to exit, someone wrote a utility to force the
kill on outlook.exe after exiting from Outlook; see
http://www.daveswebsite.com/software/olshutdown/index.shtml. I
trialed it several years ago but don't use it (outlook.exe doesn't
hang that often and killing it in Task Manager is okay by me, for
now).
If you use an add-in that does cleanup or some database management
when Outlook exits then you might have to wait longer than a minute to
ensure outlook.exe got unloaded okay. For example, if you use the
Personal Files Backup add-in which periodically backs up the .pst file
for Outlook, and if the PST file is huge, it could take awhile to save
a backup copy of that file.
